(MusicPortal.com) (04/15/05)

Edited By Michael Bennett

LOS ANGELES, CA - 2005 is shaping up to be a busy year for MICHELLE SHOCKED, who will release a new trilogy of albums via her own Mighty Sound Records label on June 7th.

The two-time Grammy nominee presents the threesome, which continue the "American Trilogy" concept of her first three Mercury albums, in a very unique way.

The new albums, entitled "Don't Ask Don't Tell," "Mexican Standoff" and "Got No Strings" chronicle a tumultuous time of life, including her recent divorce.

However, this isn't to imply that the songs are bitter.

In fact, to the contrary, they're executed with humor, imagination, irony and empowerment -- and in voices most have never heard from Michelle Shocked.

There's Rock and after-hours Blues and Hardcore Punk and twang shading her sly lyrics.

First, there are three main things you need to know about Michelle Shocked.

Number one, she possesses an outsized ambition. Number two, she abhors unfinished business. Number three, she has a thing for the number 3.

These factors play into the new trilogy of albums, each recorded simultaneously during a sustained burst of unrivalled creativity from December 2004 to January 2005, with each one hewing to a particular stylistic concept.

Just as audaciously, she's releasing the three albums simultaneously.

Most artists wouldn't even conceive of such an undertaking, let alone see it through - but Michelle Shocked isn't just any other artist.

Dancing to the beat of her own wild heart and soul, she nimbly negotiates the tightrope that stretches between here and heaven, and does it all by working without a net.

The trilogy is hardly a new concept to this single-minded artist.

After all, she started her recording career with three stylistically different distinct albums in "Short Sharp Shocked" (1988), "Captain Swing" (1989) and "Arkansas Traveler" (1992).

Together, the latter three albums defined her wide-open milieu that encompassed everything from Rock, Country, Blues, Folk and Swing to all manners of indigenous American music.

If she'd had her way, Michelle Shocked would've made and released the latter three all at once, but ambition of this magnitude is often seen as folly in the world of major record labels.

Over time, Shocked's pioneering vision contrasted with the conventional music business.

Today, Michelle Shocked follows her heart and her gut instincts, as the new batch of platters so dramatically demonstrates.

"Don't Ask Don't Tell," the first of the upcoming trilogy, is primarily a Rock album, full of guitar and guts, produced by Dusty Wakeman (Dwight Yoakam, Anne McCue).

The Santa Maria of Shocked's three musical vessels is "Don't Ask Don't Tell," a break-up epic in the grand tradition of Richard and Linda Thompson's "Shoot Out The Lights," Bob Dylan's "Blood On The Tracks" or even Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear," with the chromatic eclecticism of an album like Los Lobos' "Kiko."

Like those enduring classics, "Don't Ask Don't Tell" obviously encompasses the product of real-life experience.

Songs as psychologically withering as 'Elaborate Sabotage,' 'Hardly Gonna Miss Him,' 'Evacuation Route' and 'Fools Like Us' simply can't be conjured up out of thin air.

Despite the corrosive subject matter (or perhaps because of it), "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is consistently playful and seductive.

After all, who hasn't been through the experience of a conjugal end-game?

Throughout, Shocked gets simpatico support from producer/bassist Dusty Wakeman and his ace Mad Dog Studio house band: guitarist Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams) keyboardist Skip Edward (Dwight Yoakum) and drummer Dave Raven.

Additionally, Rich Armstrong steps up for some exquisite muted trumpet accents that are the very quintessence of heartbreak.

Shocked says, "What I love most about it is it's for a post-literary world, and yet it has all the satisfactions a literary audience would want: the themes, the way they overlap, the characters, the points of view."

"The first four songs are like 'The Many Moods of Michelle Shocked,' and then the fifth song introduces what I think of as 'The Divorce Album.'

"That song starts, 'Hardly gonna miss him/Won't notice he's gone.' I get a good laugh out of that."

This is "Short Sharp Shocked" all grown up.

"Mexican Standoff," finds Shocked abutting five Latin-tinged originals - an exploration of her own Spanish heritage - against an equal number of original Texas blues shuffles that serve as scar tissue on the open wounds of "Don't Ask Don't Tell."

Like a line drawn in the sand, the album is half Latin and half Blues - Shocked's unique tribute to both her Texas and Latin roots.

It's another unlikely juxtaposition, yet the two halves of "Mexican Standoff" compliment each other like two sides of a coin - the impassioned preacher of 'Picoesque' being "heads" and the bedeviled protagonist of 'Bitter Pill' being "tails."

Grounded in the Blues tradition that infuses all of her work, it squares off with the influences of her adopted home -- Los Angeles, California -- and an exploration of her Spanish heritage.

"You know more Spanish than you think you do," is how she accounts for the showdown between the Texas Blues shuffles on one side and the folklorico border ballads on the other.

Among the contributing musicians are drummers Pete Thomas (Elvis Costello) and James Gadsen (who's played with everyone from Bobby Womack to Beck), bassist Freddie Washington, accordionist Joel Guzman and baja sexto player Max Baca (Los Super Seven).

With basic production by Los Lobos' Steve Berlin on the Spanglish tracks and Mark Howard on the Blues numbers, Dusty Wakeman is once again at the production helm on "Mexican Standoff."

Sailing in its wake is a very different album, "Got No Strings," a playfully animated work in which Michelle Shocked re-imagines songs from Disney films -- from standards like 'When You Wish Upon A Star' to memory-joggers like 'Baby Mine' -- as Western Swing numbers.

It's an inspired juxtaposition, thanks in large measure to the contributions of producer/guitarist Nick Forster of Hot Rize/ETown renown, lap steel wizard Greg Leisz, Gabe Witcher on fiddle and David Jackson on bass.

Together, the three albums are not only a remarkable artistic feat, but also a testament to Michelle Shocked's vision and true grit.

She accomplished all of this on her own, and there were more than a few points along the way when the whole thing threatened to unravel like a mohair sweater in a briar patch.

She rolled with the punches and somehow held it all -- and herself -- together.

Spirit, stubbornness and underdog determination are also deeply ingrained in Shocked's character.

"I bought this old car before I learned how to drive a standard shift," she recalls.

"My dad tried to teach me, but he was too impatient. I had to head back to East Texas, and he said, 'Look, it's your car - you're gonna have to drive it.'"

"I said, 'Just get me on the highway; I'll get it home somehow.' He showed me how to get it into third gear, and I asked him if he'd jump out of the car."

"He wouldn't, so I had to stop, let him get out and then go through the gears all over again."

"I took it all the way home in third gear - red lights, stop signs, I didn't care. Just get it home."

If Michelle Shocked's life seems like an incredible road movie, a tall tale, a legend, it is no mystery.

Michelle Shocked set forth on her adventure ever so young but ever so determined to jump past, jump through, jump beyond any boundary that held her back.

The soaking humid Piney Woods swamplands of east Texas at the edge of the border with Louisiana was where she came from; born in Dallas and schooled in Gilmer.

Raised in a large, extremely poor, strict fundamentalist Mormon household, her escape consisted of Summers spent with her hippie atheist father.

Shocked left home for good at 16.

Putting herself through the University of Texas at Austin, with no financial support from her family, she graduated with a degree in Oral Interpretation of Literature.

"It was the careerist '80s, and that seemed like the least practical thing I could pursue," recalls Shocked.

After graduation she hit the road, in customary Jack Kerouac fashion.

She rambled first to California , playing mandolin and fiddle in street bands, emerging as a staunch political activist first and foremost.

Her persona was unadulterated Punk rocker with a spiky mohawk and a ring in her nose. She hung out on San Francisco 's Hardcore scene with MDC and the Dead Kennedys.

Arrested at the 1984 Democratic Convention, a front-page news photo of her struggling with the police would ultimately serve as an album cover.

Her mother would eventually commit Shocked to a mental institution against her will. "After 30 days, the insurance money ran out, so I was 'cured' and they released me."

Back on the street, dazed by the chemical straightjacket drugs given her by the mental health authorities, half-convinced that she was indeed crazy, she headed for New York City.

There she explored the music scene at CBGB's and ate her one big meal of the week at the Cottonwood Cafe in the West Village.

Caught up in the cycle of homelessness that swept across America in the 1980s, Michelle Shocked searched for an alternative.

She made her way to Paris and hitchhiked throughout Europe, busking on the streets of Madrid, surviving on her wits and a daily ration of alfalfa sprouts.

The vagabond lifestyle was far from ideal.

At an anti-cruise missile peace camp in Sicily, she was raped by a Green Party comrade.

Settling on Amsterdam for the interim, she worked for a pirate radio station and shared a squat with a stranded British Reggae band from Birmingham.

She was still poor, but she was free.

In 1986, Michelle Shocked returned to Texas, to the annual songwriters' gathering at the Kerrville Folk Festival, to volunteer and hang out with her friends, to listen to their new songs and play her own.

In those days (and for that matter, still today), Shocked was determined to credit her inspiration from fellow Texas songwriters Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.

An Englishman who said he was a journalist heard her one night out among the campfires and asked if she would play her songs for his Sony Walkman.

He never got around to mentioning that he was actually a partner in a brand new British independent record label.

She played him some songs out there that night, his tape recorder sitting on a log as the crickets sang bucolic background vocals and the trucks downshifted, and she told some stories.

She did not know it at the moment, but just like some of her heroes like Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, she was being "field recorded."

That tape of her music, made on a Walkman with weak batteries so that it ran far too quickly when played back at normal speed, got played repeatedly on the BBC.

It was a friend who owned a phone that got the call.

"Your record is on the charts," was the information the label, Cooking Vinyl had to report.

"What record?" Shocked inquired.

It had been named "The Texas Campfire Tapes," and it was to be her "debut" recording.

Figuring she had nothing much to lose, Michelle Shocked saw it as her chance to offer up her two-cents worth.

She had grown up in a tradition of Bluegrass and Blues, of Texas Swing and singer/songwriters, and now Shocked was an authentic British Pop phenomenon.

She played her first show, her first show ever, at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. She had planned on activism, not a music career.

Over the next eighteen months, Shocked found herself working for a manager who was also her booking agent and who was also her record label owner.

Shocked remembers, "the label was shopping me to major labels, licensing my record around the world, booking gigs, collecting commissions and my royalties, and shipping me and my guitar C.O.D."

"It was as if I'd fallen into a new job at the circus getting shot out of a cannon."

Despite the disarray, she had a plan.

Shocked risked signing with a major label (Mercury) for the sake of attempting to change the system from within.

She turned down the label's advance for the sake of owning her work. And she had another plan too.

She had organized her songs into a trilogy that was meant to show where she had come from -- not just show the listener, but to also remind herself as well.

After her first taste of circus-cannon celebrity, she was leaving something more substantial than breadcrumbs behind her to mark her way back home, a trail of remarkable songs.

Teamed with producer Pete Anderson, known for his commercial success with Dwight Yoakam, "Short Sharp Shocked" became an instant classic, so much so that when they returned to the studio a year later, most everyone presumed they would automatically set forth on "Short Sharp Shocked II."

"Captain Swing" was a lot of things, but it was not "Short Sharp Shocked II."

The album took advantage of her Texas roots to pursue her notion that swing was more than just a style that the mere act of music swinging shot past style.

Her use of horn arrangements emphasized Michelle Shocked 's diverse songwriting skills. Categories no longer applied.

"Arkansas Traveler" had always been meant to be a tribute to the fiddle tunes she had played with her father and brother on mandolins, banjos and such.

She pursued the hidden roots of that music and those old familiar tunes. Writing new lyrics, trying out new ways of playing the oldest of tunes, writing new tunes that sounded ancient, she traveled three continents to play with her heroes and her peers and a few rank strangers.

Pops Staples, Doc Watson, Gatemouth Brown, Jim mie Driftwood, Taj Mahal, and Allison Krauss were part of the adventure.

Recorded on steamboats, in log cabins and yes, even in recording studios, "Arkansas Traveler" was a triumph.

Even though Michelle Shocked did not know what would come next, at least she knew she had made her way back home.

Following her instincts, she began exploring Gospel traditions while attending an African-American church in Los Angeles, where she was living on a houseboat.

Shocked began writing a Gospel record.

On the day her next recording was to begin, she entered the studio to discover that her label was refusing to issue payment before the session even started.

Shocked recounts, "I was taken into a closed-door meeting with the head of business affairs, who informed me that the label was no longer going to promote my music because I cut too good a deal for myself!"

Her catalog was continuing to sell steadily, and the label wanted the masters back.

She left the office and she never went back -- not until the day she arrived to collect what she had owned all along.

Other labels tried to sign her; Mercury sent a cease-and-desist letter that blanketed the music industry.

They would not let her record and they were not going to release her.

Shocked recorded a solo electric record called "Kind Hearted Woman" and sold it exclusively at her shows in defiance of her label's efforts to stop her.

She toured relentlessly, reconfirming her consummate talent as a stage performer.

Pioneering an artists' rights paradigm, she sued Mercury using the 13th Amendment, the reform abolishing slavery.

They settled the day the trial was to begin and, for the first time in years, Michelle Shocked was free again.

She recorded a new version of "Kind Hearted Woman" with her band in 1996, releasing it on Private Music/BMG, but this time the contract gave her the option on the master tapes.

Three months later, in a classic corporate shake-up, Private Music was folded into a different entity.

She exercised her option and was spared the fate of so many artists in recent years, trapped in the consolidation of the recording industry.

Today, Michelle Shocked owns "Kind Hearted Woman" and her entire catalog of music. It is difficult to think of another major label artist who has ever been in that position.

Shocked now spends time between her homes in Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Known at her church as "Sister Shocked," she continues to work quietly for non-violence in the environmental and global justice movements.

Her current efforts also involve support for "Save Africa's Children," a pan-African vision that addresses the AIDS pandemic on the African continent.

She has written a cycle of songs inspired by the brass band scene in New Orleans.

Shocked spent time wandering through Mexico and Guatemala, creating another body of work which explores her Latin-American heritage.

Additionally, she has collaborated with Fiachna O'Braonain (of Ireland 's Hothouse Flowers) on material that presents their vision for the new millennium.

The first result of that collaboration is her latest release, "Deep Natural."

Co-produced by O'Braonain, "Deep Natural" launched Shocked's own Mighty Sound label in typically innovative fashion in 2002.

The release is book-ended with an alternate version of instrumentals entitled "Dub Natural."

By stripping away her voice and lyrics, "Dub Natural" emphasizes the rich musicality that has always been part of Michelle Shocked's work. Mighty Sound (Ryko Distribution) has now planned a full schedule of deluxe reissues of her catalog.

The label will also be a home for her forthcoming projects, as well as new and developing artists.

For some, that would be all the story necessary. For Michelle Shocked, plainly it is just one more step on her journey.

Or as she states, "I can't tell you where I'm going, but I can tell you where I come from."

Amzingly, there are three more albums right behind these, completely different in musical styles, including Gospel/Electronica, New Orleans-style Jazz and a tribute to Blues pioneer Memphis Minnie.

Says Shocked, "You can't stop creative momentum. When it hits, you gotta roll with it..."

"I do tend to think in concepts of trilogies, tryptichs, trios, and so it seems like a natural, if not a complete cycle to me."

Copyright 2004-2009 Internet Music Media. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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